Why pay this team when you just made just purchased a 49% stake at billions of dollars with another ai team?
Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
381–390 of 466 posts
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#382These sorts of adjunct, off-to-the-side "ethics" teams are always corporate window dressing, and when push comes to shove they always get jettisoned when competition demands an increase in speed. I don't mean to start a flame war, but this is a reason why I think "Chief Diversity Officers" are such an ill-conceived notion. It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable, but it's…
> A Chief Diversity Officer's job largely comes down to telling other teams how they should change [..]. I have yet to see that approach work.
Similar challenge faced by CISOs everywhere. Yes, the CISO usually gets to own some little piece (depends on the company) but most of the job is about trying to sweet talk the other parts of the company to care about security without having actual ownership authority to make it happen.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't have the clairvoyant ability to know that AGI will exist in any future near enough to worry about. It might or it might not - and even if it exists we could get its nature wrong and worry about the wrong things.
This isn't congruent with the AI research community consensus. There's debate over many points, but that we will develop AGI is seen as a forgone conclusion almost universally. The most pessimistic place it closer to 2100, others say 5 years, most say Notably the people closest to the fire, those advancing SOTA AI capabilities and those deepest into alignment/existential risk research, both say it is coming this deca…
Serious question: do you have a track record of the long-term forecasts of the research community? If they are quite good at this - fair enough.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
The need for maximization of profits will pretty much always trump any sort of ethics team in place. LLM have been selected as the "new frontier" for a lot of these companies an in turn any sort of "fat" that can be trimmed from the system will be.
To be clear, there's never a need to maximize profits, only a relentless desire to do so.
They're required to act in best interest of the shareholders, this usually means maximizing profits or share value.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#385I don't mean to come off as naive here, but a non-cynical explanation for the layoffs is just that this is a new field and it's going to take a little experimentation to rightsize the staffing levels most effectively. According to the article, "Microsoft still maintains an active Office of Responsible AI, which is tasked with creating rules and principles to govern the company’s AI initiatives. The company says its overall investment in responsibility work is increasing despite the recent layoffs," and it's possible to take that statement more or less at face value and not assume they are just throwing responsible AI out of the window.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#386These sorts of adjunct, off-to-the-side "ethics" teams are always corporate window dressing, and when push comes to shove they always get jettisoned when competition demands an increase in speed. I don't mean to start a flame war, but this is a reason why I think "Chief Diversity Officers" are such an ill-conceived notion. It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable, but it's…
This. People should understand AI safety != AI ethics. AI safety has two branches, AI ethics and AI alignment. Those two branches despise each other with intense passion. The alignment branch (responsible for developing RLHF->ChatGPT) believes AI ethics is completely trivial, and distracts attention away from existential risks. The ethics branch (responsible for all the media attention about racist AIs/bias etc) view…
Oh boy, the ethics problems do manifest in the real world much more than alignment problems. If only for the simple reason that ethics problems can and do arise in the use of very simple models (logistic regression) and are not preconditioned on achieving AGI or anything close.
For example a logistic regression model for fraud detection that bases it's decision mostly on zip codes. Is actually a proxy for deciding based on race (in the US at least)
These kind of models are already massively used and commercially sold not as some curiosities but as decision makers that impact the day to day life's of millions if not billions of ppl.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#387What a strange comment section. A customer service chatbot telling your customers that an issue is solved, when the issue isn't solved, is a core product failure. It's also a Responsible AI issue. A code generation model suggesting GPL code without attribution is a core product failure and serious legal risk [1]. It's also a Responsible AI issue. A diffusion model generating child porn or nazi propaganda is a core pr…
You don't need an ethics team to tell you about those risks, they are pretty obvious.
What you need is your legal team to tell you how risky it is, and management to decide how risk averse they want to be.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost entirely, the existence of Chief Diversity Officers - and to a lesser but still prevalent extent, this "off-to-the-side" teams you mention - are just jobs programs with an identity politics twist. CDOs exist so that the "right" people can have a high-power (even if only via public perception), well-paid C-suite role. These ethics teams exist so that a group of the "right" people can level up their resumes. Ins…
Presumably you feel the same way about - say 'Chief Security Officers' who may not own a specific team. Off-the-side offers are there to make sure that issue which have been identified as organisationally important have representation at the top table.
What kind of Chief Security Officer doesn't have a team? I would expect them to have a team that does things like security scans, pentesting, auditing, researching CVEs to find ones that might affect the company, etc.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#389>About five months later, on March 6, remaining employees were told to join a Zoom call at 11:30AM PT to hear a “business critical update” from Montgomery
Wow, even MS doesn't like teams.
Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams
#390End of the day the AI space will be dominated by whatever model doesn’t lecture you about “as a large language model I can’t…”. And the company that will ship that won’t have the largest “AI safety and ethics” team. ChatGPT will become as irrelevant as Dall-E2 when that happens. (Not saying this is for the best, just saying what I think will happen)
And I hope we will have good AIs running on our own hardware. I obviously want to use AI to create lots of porn for me. And that is really no one else s business.
Speaking of - I already heard of a project that is fine-tuning StableDiffusion to produce porn.